Leiden is bursting with student associations, from sports to music associations and from social to cultural associations. And this is good news because they will help you make more than just friends.

Is this the master's specialisation of your choice? Please read here about the admissibility for this programme.

Is this the master's specialisation of your choice? Please read here about the admissibility for this programme.

Is this the master's specialisation of your choice? Please read here about the admissibility for this programme.

Is this the master's specialisation of your choice? Please read here about the admissibility for this programme.

Is this the master's specialisation of your choice? Please read here about the admissibility for this programme.

We study how communication can heal and harm when patients are confronted with an illness. Most of our studies focus on serious illnesses such as advanced cancer. Communication lies at the heart of medicine, yet we do not always know which specific communication helps patients. Moreover, many complaints…

If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy regularly publishes reviews of recent books within the field of diplomacy and global affairs, written in English, Spanish, French, or German.

Our research regularly receives attention in the (Dutch) popular media. Here is an overview.

During the spring of 2021, a group of eight biology students from Leiden set out into the dunes in search of amphibians. Using DNA, they determined the geographic origin of the animals. And guess what? In many cases they discovered exotic populations of animals that do not naturally belong in The Netherlands.…

The project Going Dutch investigates why the link between being or becoming Dutch, and knowledge of Standard Dutch is so often taken for granted in public discourse, by diving into its historical roots.

Molecules are extremely hard to see in visible light, especially without using fluorescence. Leiden physicists have now made their optical technique sensitive enough to image the molecules of their interest in all sizes. Publication in Nanoletters.

Beatrice Penati is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). Dr Penati will deliver a guest lecture on Monday, 10 October and a masterclass on Thursday, 13 October within the Central Asia Initiative at Leiden University.

Speech Prosody 2024 includes seven special sessions. When making a submission, authors are asked to indicate whether they want their paper to be considered for a special session. You can find descriptions of each below.

The Middle Ages are becoming increasingly more popular: just look at the popularity of such ‘medievalist’ TV series as Game of Thrones and Vikings, and let’s not forget popular re-enactments of medieval battles. Leiden University is home to many specialists of this fascinating period and this new blog…

A new graphene-based method could make for faster, cheaper and more accurate DNA sequencing, say a group of Leiden physicists and chemists.

After seven years, Eric Eliel resigns as scientific director of the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). On April 18th, LION hosts a farewell party and a week later Eliel will officially hand over his tasks to Jan Aarts. We spoke with him about his term as director, in which among others a new science…

A delegation from Leiden University is visiting Brazil from 14 to 18 March. The first day of the visit was spent with scientists in São Paolo.

Physicist Sense Jan van der Molen researches materials that do not exist in nature. ‘It’s fascinating to see how the properties of a material change if we manage to make it super thin.’ He will give his inaugural lecture on 21 October.

Data from 41 million galaxies does not shake up the standard cosmological model after all. To that conclusion, to their own surprise, comes an international team of researchers including Koen Kuijken, professor at the Leiden Observatory.

The Leiden Institute of Physics hosted the annual conference of the Dutch Vacuum Society (NEVAC). Experts in the field of vacuum experiments talked about their research. The 2016 NEVAC Prize was awarded to PhD student Martijn Vos from the TU Eindhoven.

Science Magazine has published three back-to-back papers on an important discovery in solid state physics. Leiden physicist Jan Zaanen wrote a Perspective article on the subject in the same issue of 4 March.

A collaboration of physicists and chemists organized the LEELIS conference on new computer chip technology in Amsterdam on 10-11 November. Leiden physicist Joost Frenken is director of the organizing institute ARCNL.

Electrons that spin synchronously around their axis, turn out to stay superconducting across large distances within magnetic chromium dioxide. Electric current from these electrons can flip small magnets, and its superconducting version could form the basis for a hard drive without energy loss. Publication…

We don’t understand how some materials become superconducting at relatively high temperatures. Leiden physicists have now found a surprising connection with auxiliary black holes. It enables us to use our knowledge of black holes on the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity. Publication in Nature…

Electric noise can be useful for scientists but inconvenient for chip manufacturers. They do share a wish to predict the amount of noise. PhD student Sumit Tewari overturns a century-old law relating noise to current. He defends his thesis on March 27th.

Sander Blok has won the third edition of the annual LION Image Award. He created a colorful image of gold nanoparticles with a low-energy electron microscope.

If computers work on superconducting current, they won’t consume any energy. Leiden physicists have now gained control over a new type of superconducting memory elements. Publication in Nature Communications.

The coastal site of Butrint is situated on a peninsula in south-western Albania, opposite the island of Corfu and Apulia in southern Italy (across the Adriatic Sea). In Medieval times, Butrint served as a connecting bridge between East and West – between Byzantium and the Latin world.

Learn all about the writing systems used in the famous wall poems of the city of Leiden.

At LUCIS we offer a varied programme of scholarly meetings (conferences, workshops) which reflect our multidisciplinary and comparative view on Islam and Muslim societies in past and present.

Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) is an internationally oriented institute for research and education in biology. We are part of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University.

European product safety law is one of the focal points of internal market legislation.

The Old Observatory has a rich history. On this page you will find a short version of the history that took place in the observatory.

Lecture

A linguistic reconstruction of the migration of the Tocharians from Europe to China

This was the programme for The Knowledge Orchard 2025:

This research project is an integral part of its mother-programme NEXUS1492 ERC Synergy Project directed by Prof. Corinne Hofman. Overarchingly, it aims at understanding and bridging from the archaeological perspective the late pre-colonial and early colonial history of the Southeastern Caribbean macroregion…

The research project ‘The History of National Security, 1945-present', is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Campus The Hague/Leiden University and the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH). The project will run until the summer of 2013, when we hope…

On February 2nd, 2018, Professor Sven P. Vleeming of Trier University was presented with a ‘Festschrift’ to celebrate his retirement last summer. The book was presented to him, in the presence of friends and colleagues from the Netherlands and abroad, by the editors: his former Leiden colleagues Koen…

Political scientist Rebekah Tromble (Leiden University) has been appointed as an academic advisor to the Social Science One research commission. She will assist the commission in its new partnership with Facebook, which aims to facilitate in-depth studies of the role of social media in elections and…

Lecture

Lieke Kools has won a Netspar PhD Thesis Award 2020 with her dissertation ‘Essays on wealth, health, and data collection’.

We are very proud to announce that the Geoff Masel Prize 2017 was awarded to Mr. Roberto Cassar, for his essay

The behaviour of strongly correlated electron systems, such as high-temperature superconductors, defies explanation in the language of ordinary quantum theory. A seemingly unrelated area of physics, string theory, might give physicists a better understanding of the weird behaviour of these kinds of…